Like almost all other savages, the native Australians are rapidly disappearing before the spread of civilization. The European settlers crowd them out of all the more fertile and habitable lands, pressing them more and more into the desert of the interior, where they find it exceedingly hard to obtain in their roving, unsettled lives the necessary means of subsistence. Great numbers are thus forced to succumb to deprivations not of their own bringing, and not a few to the diseases and vices brought among them by the new possessors of their domains. The lowest estimate of their number, prior to the settlement of Europeans among them, gives over 150,000, but the natives still surviving scarcely figure one-half of that population. It is only a question of a decade or two when the Australian, like the Tasmanian, who was once his near neighbor, will have vanished from off the face of the country, leaving behind him his implements of war and the chase, his culinary and domestic apparatus, and the rude carvings of his hands in caves and in rocks, as the principal evidences of his earthly existence. By competent critics the Australian is pronounced to be the most degraded of human beings, and the lowest type of man. In reason, love, generosity, conscience and mere responsibility he is the inferior of many of the lower animals, and in the erection of a house for comfort, shelter and security he is surpassed by creatures even as low in the scale as the worms and insects. It is true, when hunger has to be met, that he has shown some skill in the manufacture of implements necessary to the obtainment of his food, and also in resisting the attacks of his own kind and of the natural enemies by which he is surrounded. There is no doubt that he is well satisfied with his condition in life, and could hardly be induced to exchange it for another. He has doubtless fulfilled the purpose of his being in the world, and unable to cope in the struggle for existence with a superior civilization must succumb to the latter which is better fitted to endure, a sad but impressive lesson which is the teaching of every chapter of the world’s geologic story. LIVING SOULS. All things were made by the Word of God. In this Word was life, spirit or energy. Without it was not anything made that was made. Hence, says Elihu, “the _Spirit_ of God hath made me, and the _breath_ of the Almighty hath given me _life_;” or, as Moses testifies, “the Lord God formed man, the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives; and _man_ became _a_ LIVING SOUL.”